What We’re Reading

Palestinian refugees

On Monday, Palestinians mark 69 years since hundreds of thousands of them were forced from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of Israel. Many settled in the neighboring West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

US-Israel relations

The White House has yet to publish the itinerary for Trump’s May 22-23 visit to Israel — the 11th presidential trip to the country since Richard Nixon came in 1974 — but according to sources involved in planning the trip, he is set to visit the Western Wall.

US President Donald Trump is assessing whether moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would help or hurt prospects for clinching an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said, revealing Trump’s criteria for a decision that could reverberate throughout the volatile Middle East.

Palestinian politics

Palestinians in the occupied West Bank voted on Saturday in municipal elections that underscored deep rifts between President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party and Islamist rival Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip.

After local activists in Anabta in the northern occupied West Bank district of Tulkarem blockaded the main street of the village on Monday, activists clashed with Palestinian forces who arrived several minutes later to reopen the road, leaving a number of the activists bruised and suffering from tear gas inhalation.

Several journalists from the Gaza Strip have recently been kidnapped by the Hamas-run security services, beaten and tortured, to finally be released after being instructed not to criticize the movement.

Hamas’s new ‘Document of Principles’ ditches Islamism for frank positions on borders, international law, and human rights. But can the movement maintain unity as it inches closer to the ideas held by its rivals in the PLO?

Settlements

A regional council in the West Bank has begun soliciting bids to build over 200 apartments in a Jewish settlement under its authority. The news comes a week ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Hebrew University canceled the conference after a student group associated with Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party penned an open letter to the university president. ‘The very existence of this conference lends legitimacy to terror.’